There is a current need for a case budgeting tool as a way to control legal expenses incurred, for example, by organizations that find it necessary to employ external legal counsel from time-to-time in addition to their own regularly employed internal counsel. Such a case budgeting tool should enable the making of decisions that are better informed on the part of the organization's internal lawyers, as well as its external lawyers, in developing strategies and making better cost/benefit analyses, for example, by reducing various factors to writing and allowing analysis of those factors. In addition, such a case budgeting tool should reduce external counsel fees and costs, for example, as the result of sharing such reduction to writing for discussion and agreement on various objectives between the organization's internal and external counsel. Additionally, such a case budgeting tool should allow for better decisions by internal counsel and/or business people.
Further, such a case budgeting tool should involve a periodic review, such as monthly, every two months, or quarterly, as well as a reconciliation process to help control external legal costs and build a dialogue between the organization's external and internal counsel regarding, for example, budgeting decisions and follow-through on such decisions. Typically, external counsel furnish only generalized budgets which simply break matters, such as litigation, into different stages. For example, an external firm's typical litigation budget may estimate the cost of phases, such as pre-trial, trial, and post-trial phases or particular aspects of those phases, such as discovery and motions. There is a current need for a breakdown of such costs on a month-by-month basis, looking forward to a quarter, to enable the organization's financial controllers to appropriately budget and forecast external counsel fees and costs and to compare those forecasts with actual fees and costs.